James Mark Pittman (October 25, 1957 - November 25, 2009) was a financial journalist covering corporate finance and derivative markets. He was awarded several prestigious journalism awards, the Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award, a New York Press Club award, the Hillman Prize and several New York Associated Press awards. Biographical details Pittman was born in Kansas City, Kansas. Standing , he was a linebacker and first baseman on his high school teams. After attending engineering classes, he graduated in 1981 with a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. He has a daughter, Maggie, from his first marriage. He met his second wife, Laura Fahrenthold of Rochester, New York, also a journalist, in 1994. Five years after moving to Yonkers from Brooklyn, they opened an art gallery there in 2005. The name of the gallery, Y.O.H. Gallery, which stood for "Yonkers on Hudson", was an attempt to blend the city's urban culture with phrasing suggestive of more affluent towns on the Hudson further north. Pittman suffered a fatal heart attack in November, 2009. His wife spent four summers spreading his ashes on 31,000 miles of cross country/Canada RV trips with their two daughters. Her love story/memoir, THE PINK STEERING WHEEL CHRONICLES, was published released in June 2018 by Hatherleigh Press/Penguin Random House. Career Pittman started out as a police-beat reporter for the Coffeyville Journal in Coffeyville, Kansas before moving to Rochester, where he worked for a year at the Democrat & Chronicle. From 1985 to 1997, he worked as a reporter, editor and bureau chief at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. He had a reputation there for being intimidating, relentless, funny and brilliant. He joined Bloomberg News in 1997, where he wrote about finance, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, energy markets, politics and economics. Commenting on Pittman's sense of humor, Congressman Brad Miller wrote in the Huffington Post. Predicted financial crisis In summer 2007, Pittman wrote stories predicting the collapse of the banking system. His article "S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds" was excoriated by Portfolio.com in an unsigned post, which was later reversed in a signed apology. He was instead praised for "doing the kind of provocative journalism that treads new ground and rings alarms." Pittman said that his early experience dealing with police gave him a "big BS detector" because he was lied to so